18. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
I’ve never been good at covert operations.
Bree says I have an honest face, which sounds like a compliment until you realize it means I can’t lie worth a damn.
My left eye twitches. My voice goes up half an octave.
Once, in vet school, I tried to call in sick so I could study for a biochemistry exam, and the department secretary said “Gracie, you sound fine, take some Tylenol and come in.”
So when I’m planning what amounts to a pregnant-lady heist, sneak out of my own farm, drive to the county clinic without being seen, get my twins checked, sneak back before anyone notices. I know the odds aren’t great.
But Doc Meadows doesn’t do house calls for ultrasounds, and I can’t skip this appointment, and I’m absolutely not ready to tell Mal that the reason I’ve been “sick” for months is currently tap-dancing on my bladder.
I wait until he’s in the far pasture with Denny, fixing the section of fence that Meatball broke last week. They’ll be out there for hours. Plenty of time.
I grab my keys, shove sunglasses on my face like a woman in a heist film, and mutter “you’re being ridiculous” to myself the whole way from the house to my truck.
The twins kick their agreement.
“Hush,” I tell them. “Mama’s scheming.”
The county clinic is twenty-three minutes away, tucked behind the Piggly Wiggly in a building that used to be a laundromat. The waiting room smells like antiseptic and stale coffee, and the chairs are the kind of orange vinyl that sticks to your thighs in summer.
I sign in, take a seat, pick up a six-month-old copy of People magazine.
Normal. This is normal. Pregnant women go to appointments alone all the time.
“Gracie?”
The voice behind me makes my whole body go cold.
I turn around, and there’s Mal, standing in the clinic doorway with a paper bag in his hand and an expression like someone just punched him in the chest.
“What are you-” He’s across the room in three strides, bag forgotten on a chair, dropping to his knees in front of me like I’m injured. “Are you hurt? What’s wrong? Why didn’t you tell me you had an appointment?”
“Mal-”
“Gracie, what’s wrong with you?” His hands are on my arms, my face, checking for damage. “I’ve been watching you get sicker for weeks, and you won’t tell me anything, and I come into town to get you tea because you won’t touch ginger anymore and I see your truck here, and I thought - I thought-”
“Mal, stop-”
“Tate?”
The nurse’s voice cuts through the waiting room, cheerful as a bell, and my entire life ends in slow motion.
“Your OB’s ready! Maternity’s just down the hall.”
Silence.
The word maternity drops between us and just sits there, live and ticking.
Mal’s hands go still on my arms. I watch it move across his face in stages: confusion, then calculation, then a dawning horror that would be almost funny if it weren’t carving my heart out of my chest.
“Gracie.” His voice is barely a whisper. “Are you-?”
I can’t speak.
“Are you pregnant?”
I open my mouth to lie, to deflect, to say anything that isn’t the truth, but his eyes are so blue, and his hands are shaking, and I’m so goddamn tired of carrying this alone.
“Yes.”
He rocks back like I’ve hit him.
I stand up, pulling away from his grip, and he follows me into the hallway on autopilot, paper bag abandoned, face the color of old newspaper.
“How long?” He’s whisper-shouting, which I didn’t know was possible. “How long have you known?”
“I found out a month before you came.”
He stops walking, and I stop with him, and we’re standing in a clinic hallway having the worst conversation of our marriage while a nurse waits at the end of the corridor with a clipboard.
“You - you knew. When you set my terms, when you made me work for scraps, when you let me sleep in that freezing bunkhouse thinking you were dying-”
“I never said I was dying-”
“You didn’t say you weren’t!” His voice cracks. “I thought you had cancer, Gracie. I thought - I’ve been lying awake every night for weeks trying to figure out how to ask, how to help, how to be there for whatever horrible thing was happening to you, and the whole time-”
“The whole time I was carrying your children and trying to decide if you even deserved to know!”
That stops him.
The nurse clears her throat. “Mrs. Tate? We really do need to-”
“One minute,” I snap, and she retreats.
Mal’s staring at me like I’m a stranger. “Children. Plural?”
And suddenly I’m so tired, tired of the secret, tired of the fear, tired of being the only one who knows what’s growing inside me. “Twins. I’m having twins.”
He makes a sound I’ve never heard before, broken and small.
“Come in, then,” I say, because I’m out of moves, out of lies, out of walls to hide behind. “If you want to know so badly, come in.”
He follows me into the exam room like a man walking into weather.
Doc Meadows is sixty-three, gray-haired, and completely unbothered by the six-foot-four man standing frozen in the corner of her exam room like a statue of a man having a crisis.
“So this is the daddy,” she says, not making it a question. “Good. Bout time. Gracie, hop up.”
I get on the table. The paper crinkles under me. Mal hasn’t moved.
Doc squirts gel on my stomach. I’ve stopped being modest about this; she’s seen everything anyway, and presses the wand to the small swell I’ve been hiding under flannels and overalls for months.
The room fills with sound.
Not one heartbeat. Two.
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh, and under it, a half-beat behind, whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.
Offset, overlapping, unmistakably alive.
“There’s Baby A,” Doc says, pointing at the screen. “And there’s Baby B. Good strong heartbeats. Growing right on track.” She glances at Mal. “You want to see, or you gonna stand in that corner all day?”
He moves like a sleepwalker. Crosses to the table. Looks at the screen.
I watch his face instead.
The anger drains out of him all at once. What’s left is raw and scared. His hand comes up, hovers near the monitor like he wants to touch it, then drops back to his side.
“Those are-”
“Your babies,” Doc says. “Congratulations. You’re having twins.”
He doesn’t say a word.
Doc finishes the exam, wipes the gel off my stomach, hands me a printout of the ultrasound and a list of next appointments. “No questions? Good. See you in four weeks, Gracie. And you-” she points at Mal-“make sure she eats. She’s too thin.”
Then she’s gone, and it’s just us.
Mal still hasn’t spoken.
I get off the table, pull my shirt down, grab my bag. “We should go.”
He nods, once, and follows me out.
The drive home takes twenty-three minutes, and he doesn’t say a single word.
I keep glancing at him, at his knuckles bloodless on the steering wheel of his truck (he drove; I couldn’t argue, couldn’t do anything but follow him out of that clinic), at the muscle jumping in his jaw, at the chain around his neck that’s disappeared under his collar like even the ring is hiding from this.
He parks at my gate. Gets out. Walks around to open my door.
I let him help me down, and he walks me to the porch steps, and then-
He lets go.
“I need-” His voice sounds like gravel. “I need a minute.”
“Mal-”
“Please.” He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the horizon, at the fence line, at anything that isn’t my face. “Just - please.”
He walks away.
Not toward the bunkhouse, toward the back pasture, the long stretch of fence that runs along the property line, the place where there’s nothing but grass and sky and room to fall apart.
I watch him go. Watch him get smaller against the sunset, his shoulders bent, his stride uneven, like a man who just took a bullet and is trying to figure out where it landed.
And I did that.
I lied to him for months, and I let him think I was dying, and I kept his children from him because I wasn’t sure he deserved to know. And maybe he didn’t. Maybe every boundary I set was fair and earned and righteous.
But watching him walk away from me now, breaking in a way I’ve never seen him break-
I go inside. I close the door.
I get as far as the bedroom before the crying starts.